Strategies for innovating into the future:
Global futurist and author Jack Uldrich offers essential strategic information on nanotechnology, robotics, biotechnology, RFID and many other future technologies to help you prosper as exponential trends converge at this unique moment in history.
Recent Videos
Subscribe to the Exponential Executive Newsletter Now!
Please enter your name and email:
Recent Blog Posts
Most Popular Posts
Articles Listed by Industry
Health CareManufacturing
Computer/Semiconductor
Telecommunications
Energy
Life Science/Pharmeceutical
Agriculture
Education
Robots
Internet/Information Tech
Finance
Nanotechnology
Retail/Marketing
Automobile/Aerospace
Defense
Aging Services
Other
Articles Listed by Chapter
Chapter 1: The Power of ZenzizenzizenzicChapter 2: Exponential Enablers
Chapter 3: Walk the Escalator
Chapter 4: The Power of Play
Chapter 5: The Spice of Life--Diversity
Chapter 6: Heads and Tails: It's Counterintuitive
Chapter 7: Get in Touch with Your Animal Instincts
Chapter 8: Back to the Future
Chapter 9: Learning to Unlearn
Chapter 10: Doing the Impossible
Other
Archives
August, 2010July, 2010
June, 2010
May, 2010
April, 2010
March, 2010
February, 2010
January, 2010
December, 2009
November, 2009
October, 2009
September, 2009
August, 2009
July, 2009
June, 2009
May, 2009
April, 2009
March, 2009
February, 2009
January, 2009
December, 2008
November, 2008
October, 2008
September, 2008
August, 2008
July, 2008
June, 2008
May, 2008
April, 2008
March, 2008
February, 2008
January, 2008
December, 2007
November, 2007
October, 2007
September, 2007
August, 2007
Jump The Curve Archives: 02/2008
The Future of Agriculture
On the inside pages of today’s Wall Street Journal is a half-page advertisement from BASF touting its ability to get “48 miles per kennel.” The claim is a clever bit of hyperbole, but it does hint at a promising future for the entire agricultural sector.
A Replacement for the Tractor? Not Quite.
For centuries, the agricultural industry has been adept at applying the latest advances in technology to improve both yield and productivity. There is no reason to believe this trend will stop anytime soon and one unlikely hero in this unfolding technological revolution will be the humble supercomputer.
Earlier this week, researchers at Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratories announced they were developing an exascale computer. For those of you counting at home an exascale computer will be 1000 times faster than today’s petaflop computers—which as I explained in this piece are already wickedly powerful.
Now these supercomputers won’t be tilling the fields or harvesting crops anytime soon, but they will allow farmers to reap more from every kennel of corn and acre of land. This is because supercomputers are the engines fueling the new discoveries being made in the rapidly maturing field of genomics.
This past week witnessed two noteworthy breakthroughs. First, a team of scientists announced that they had completed a working draft of the corn genome. Among other things this development is expected to lead to better crops varieties that can meet society’s growing demand for food, livestock, feed and fuel.
Last week I wrote about how agricultural scientists had identified a key gene that boosts the yield of oil and oleic acid and explained how this could be a windfall to various agricultural companies.
With the corn genome now unraveled researchers will be able to take this advance many steps farther, including making corn both more nutritious and more efficient for ethanol production. In addition to being a boon for large ethanol producers it could also alleviate some of the tension over the “fuel versus fuel” debate by allowing farmers to squeeze more ethanol from each bushel of corn.
Bone Dry ... in a Good Way
A second area where genomics promises to yield some important breakthroughs is in the creation of drought-resistant crops. In a paper published in Nature this week, biologists at the University of California, San Diego outlined how they have isolated a gene responsible for opening and closing the stomal pores which regulates water loss from plants.
This might not sound like that big of a deal until one considers that plants under drought stress lose 95% of their water through evaporation through such pores. If successfully developed at a commercial scale—and this is still a big “if” at this time—the advance could open up vast regions of the planet to productive farming.
Farming Looks Good in Genes
As significant as these advances are, I would strongly advise readers to keep an eye on the work of geneticist Craig Venter. At a presentation at the prestigious Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference this week, he disclosed his potentially world-changing “fourth generation fuel” which, as you may have guessed, is being fueled by advances in genomics.
As Venter noted, he has 20 million genes which he can genetically reengineer to “eat” agricultural feedstocks and “excrete” pure fuel. If he is successful, agriculture could not only feed the world, it could fuel it.
Advances in genomics are going to impact a great many industries, including health care and pharmaceuticals; but for my money if you’re looking for an industry that might look really good in “genes” you should consider the agricultural sector.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
How to Turn Two Cents into $5.36 Million
For reasons I can’t entirely recall now, my freshman year of high school began on Friday, September 1, 1978--the day before the Labor Day weekend, which is traditionally regarded as the last official weekend of summer. I will never forget the very first lesson of my first class--Social Studies I. It began promptly at 8:05 AM and was taught by Louie Senta. He was a gruff old man with a shock of silver hair and a gravelly voice. If I didn’t know better I would have thought he was delivered straight from central casting to play the role of an intimidating disciplinarian--a role, I might add, that he played with a persuasive amount of gusto.
After the bell rang signaling the start of class, Senta rested his steely blue eyes upon his new wide-eyed charges for what seemed like an eternity. He then posed this peculiar question: “If you had a choice between taking $100,000 a day for this entire month or accepting a single penny today and having the penny double every day for the remainder of the month, which would you select?”
The class was silent, but I remember thinking, “What a stupid question.” Unbowed by the sea of incredulous, pimple-spotted faces staring back at him, Senta asked, “How many of you would choose $100,000 a day?” His face showed no emotion as he paused a moment to let us to ponder our answer.
At the time my only concern was whether the month of September had thirty or thirty-one days and, therefore, whether I would be entitled to the princely sum of $3 million or $3.1 million.
Senta called for a showing of hands. Without bothering to look around the room to seek the assurance of my peers, I shot my hand up. Only afterward did I glance around the room and note with mild satisfaction that my new classmates were just as bright as me.
To confirm what was already obvious, Senta then asked if anyone would choose the second option. No one raised their hand. Then, in a refrain that was to become all too familiar for the next four years of our lives, he ordered us, “Do the math. See how much richer you are because of your wisdom.”
Being good with numbers, I quickly doubled the penny ten times and calculated the sum to be $5.12. I continued on for another ten doublings. The figure after the twentieth iteration, I noted with a serene sense of satisfaction, was a scanty $5,242.88. Again, I pressed on in confidence. It was only after the twenty-eighth step--when the figure reached $1,342,177.28--that a sinking feeling came over me and I realized the error of my ways. After the thirtieth and final doubling I calculated I would have been entitled to $5,368,709.12--or almost $2.4 million more than if I had taken the “obvious” choice.
In retrospect I suspect that the purpose of Mr. Senta’s little exercise was twofold. For starters, the quiz was doubtlessly his way of humbling a bunch of cocky fourteen-year-old know-it-alls and demonstrating to us, in no uncertain terms, that we still had much to learn. In a larger sense, though, I believe he was trying to teach us a more profound philosophical lesson: Things that might at first appear to be obvious are not always so. While he didn’t say it at the time, the implicit message was that it was important to understand the underlying forces that are at work in any given situation. Or, as I say in my new book of the same name, he encouraged us to ”jump the curve.”
I tell this little story because just as my classmates and I didn’t appreciate the power of exponential growth with regard to the penny, so many people these days also underestimate the power of exponential growth in other fields. Today there are no fewer than nine technological forces that have been and are continuing to grow at near exponential rates, and unless people begin to come to terms with the momentous changes that are afoot and learn to “jump the curve,” they are going to make some costly mistakes--mistakes that will make my hypothetical loss of $2.4 million look like child’s play. The nine technological trends undergoing exponential advancement are computers/semiconductors, data storage, Internet bandwidth, the sequencing of the human genome, brain scanning, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, robotics, and the advancement of knowledge itself.
Jump the Curve is not, however, a website or blog about technology--although it will document and explore how many of these technological trends will impact the world of commerce. Rather it is about change and it will seek to continually lay out the case for why leaders must welcome change. More importantly, it will provide a number of tangible steps that will help people and organizations embrace radical change in order to tap into the amazing possibilities that these new and profound transformations will create.
Interested in reading some exponentially-related posts? Check out these past musings by Jack Uldrich:
The Power of Zenzizenzizenzic
57 Years is Now Just 41 Days
The Accelerating Pace of Disruption
Don’t Incrementalize Yourself Into the Future
Dangerous Curves Ahead
Exponential Evolution
Pong and the Future of the President’s Brain
Do You Believe in the Tooth Fairy?
Einstein, Intel and All the Rice in China
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Tesco Jumps the Curve
Tesco, one of the most innovative retailers, is at it again. Yesterday, the company announced it would be deploying “MediaCarts”—grocery carts which can sense their location in the store and trigger advertisements for nearby products—at a store in Singapore.
It would be easy to think that the technology will just be employed for advertising purposes but that is only a small part of Tesco’s plan. (In fact, if the company just plans to use it for advertising the technology will likely fail.) Rather, my hunch is that Tesco plans to use the carts to dramatically increase sales by using them to engage customers in “swarm shopping.” Swarm shopping is the practice of providing consumers with information about other shopper’s behavior.
If you have ever purchased a book on Amazon.com you have been the recipient of this practice when the computers tells you that “if you bought X then you might be also interested in Y.”
The MediaCart will operate on the same principle only it will “read” what you have already put in your cart and then try to encourage you buy other additional items which other people with a similar mix also purchased.
Think it won’t work? Perhaps, but 40 percent of all purchases are “impulse pruchases.” Often, a little nudge can go a long way.
If other retailers want to “jump the curve” and increase sales, it would behoove them to explore this technology.
Related Posts
Watch What You Eat—Literally
The Future of the Grocery Store
Retailers are Beginning to Jump the Curve
Pump It Up: Retailers Use Google to Bolster Customer Loyalty
Time is Money ... So Walk the Escalator
Stronger Than a Speeding Bullet
RFID Gets Untracked
Embracing Change
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Innovations and Opportunities
On a weekly basis I write a regular article for The Motley Fool -- an online investment newsletter—discussing how scientific and technological breakthroughs from just the past week might impact a variety of different industries and companies. Although it is written primarily with the individual investor in mind, the column is also a useful read for executives and managers who are interested in jumping the curve. This week’s article reviews how progress in the fields of agricultural genomics and atomic force microscopy could transform the energy and consumer electronics industries.
Related Posts
The Week in Innovation (Feb. 15)
Dangerous Curves Ahead
The Week in Innovation (December 12)
The Week in Innovation (December 2)
The Week in Innovation (November 26)
The Week in Innovation (November 19)
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
An Exponential Encyclopedia
In my new book, Jump the Curve, I advise executives interested in understanding where the future is headed to scan the biological world for inspiration. For some 4 billion years evolution has been busy at work at creating innovative solutions to some vexing problems. For example, salamanders can re-grow limbs, geckos can climb walls, and octupus’ can shape-shift their bodies to fit through small crevices. In their own way, each of these examples can be applied to products or inventions in order to improve life for humans.
It now appears that the world is about to be the beneficiary of an exponential explosion of biological information thanks to the new Encyclopedia of Life project which is seeking to put on-line information about every species known to mankind. According to this article, the first 30,000 pages will go up on the web tomorrow. More significantly, however, the project hopes to place an additional 1.77 million descriptions within the decade—a 59-fold increase!
In other words, within the decade there will be an exponential explosionof biological information from which to seek “bio-inspiration.”
Looking for more bits of inspiration from the animal kingdom? Check out these past posts:
Follow the Ants ... or Not
To Survive ... Change Diets
Swarm Intelligence Gets Even Smarter
Biomimickry at its Best
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Train Your Brain
Late last year, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article entitled ”This is Your Brain on the Job” that highlighted some innovative work being done by Pierre Balthazard at the Arizona State University. Balthazrad is using brain imaging technology to study brain activity in “visionary” leaders in the hopes of some day being able to train ordinary brains to act like those of leaders. To date what Balthazard has found is that visionary leaders use much higher levels of brain activity than non-visionaries in those areas of the brain associated with visual processing and organization of information.
It is a fascinating concept and it is important to understand that Balthazard is quick to dispel the notion that the idea is “a magic bullet” and that great leaders can simply be manufactured. Instead, he stresses that brain training will be a leadership-development tool.
As I mention in my book, Jump the Curve, brain scanning technology is just one of many fields experiencing exponential growth. What this means, of course, is that everything we know about the brain today—and what it might tell us about leadership—will likely pale in comparison to what scientiests will know in just a few short years. Check out this chart from Ray Kurzweil which shows the rapidly declining cost of brain scanning technology:
Brain imaging technology is already being used in the fields of economics, finance and marketing to uncover new insights; is it any less realistic to think that the technology might not also be used to improve individual’s leadership skills?
Years ago a study conducted by the American Management Association found that the best leaders had a very high tolerance for dealing with ambiguity. I am a firm believer that as a result of the accelerating rate of change in today’s exponential economy, leaders will need to embrace an even higher level of ambiguity tomorrow. If this true then it might very well make sense for executives interested in keeping abreast of these changes to openingly consider this idea of trying to better train the brain—in fact “brain training” could end up being a very useful tool in converting executives into “Exponential Executives.”
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Exascale is Exciting
BBC News is running an fascinating article suggesting that computers are already better than doctors at diagnosing certain diseases such as Alzheimers. I wrote extensively about this theme of machines beating man in my book, Jump the Curve, but this future is becoming more obvious all the time.
In another informative article in Information Week, scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratories are preparing for the creation of an exascale computer by the year 2018. Such a computer will be a thousand times more capable than today’s most powerful supercomputer and it will have a great many practical applications, including the better and faster diagnosis of diseases.
One of the lesser understood applications of exascale computers can be found in the area of material science analysis. Among the new materials scientists and researchers will be able to create are more efficient photon-absorbing materials. This, in turn, has lead a number of futurists, including myself as I wrote in this piece, to speculate that solar energy could become the pre-dominate form of energy within the next 20 years.
The future is going to be extremely exciting and one of the reasons is exascale computing.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
A Look into the Future
Check out the image to the right. Sometimes, a picture really is worth a thousand words. I’d like to thank the fine folks at Crave.com for bringing to my attention both this article as well as the artist’s conception of what a future navigational device might look like.
I have written before about the future of the cellphone, but just imagine if your next cellphone could display real-time information about your surrounding environment? In the future, the windshields of cars could also display information about what you are driving by, or a shopper could use the device to scan a food item for nutritional information, or your doctor could use it to quickly pull up all of your health records.
On the flip side, it is also easy to imagine how the police might just as easily scan your face to check if you have any outstanding parking tickets, or how some creep could pull up your Facebook profile to find out information about you.
Regardless, this technology is just around the proverbial corner and if you want to “jump the curve,” now is the time to begin considering how it will transform your business.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
The Future of Education is Now
Over the past few years I have spoken to dozens of educational groups about the future of education. To drive home the importance of change, I remind my audiences that in many technical fields—such as biology and physics—knowledge is doubling every seven years. This rapid pace of acceleration demands that all of us revisit how we approach the vital topic of education.
Luckily, new advances in technology are making it easier for teachers, administrators and school districts to ”jump the curve” and embrace technological innovation in order to stay ahead of this avalanche of new knowledge.
For example, innovative teachers are now using Curriki—an open source curriculum development tool—to continually modify their curriculum with the latest information.
Other cash-strapped school districts are considering following the example of Insight Schools in Oregon which educated 600 students last year with an all-digital curriculum—and they did it for a cost of $4,500 per student. The program now has a waiting list of 3000 students.
Still other innovative teachers are using “clicker” technology to assess students’ understanding in class. The benefit of this approach is that rather than waiting until after a test to find out if a student has grasped a key concept, the teacher gets immediate feedback. In one interesting case, a teacher using this technology discovered that 86 percent of his students incorrectly thought that the mass of a pile of iron nails left in open container would stay the same after they rusted. Seeing that the students didn’t grasp the concept that oxygen molecules were creating the rust—and thus adding weight—the teacher stopped the class and drove home this important point.
On a different front, educators in Japan are now using video technology to both engage students and help them learn better. In early studies, schools using DS Nintendo to teach writing and vocabulary have noted that 80 percent of the students using the technology have mastered junior-high-level competence in English. This compared with only 15 percent under the standard method.
There are also a variety of new tools that will soon revolutionize how we instruct our students in Spanish, French, German and Mandarin Chinese. Private on-line tutorials are already utilizing cheap bandwidth, Skype and Podcasts to transform the field by circumventing the old method of person-to-person tutoring, and other programs such as LanguageLab.com are exploring how virtual reality sites such as SecondLife can help students learn languages better by creating more realistic situations in which they can interact with native speakers.
Other virtual reality technologies are now poised to become major assets to teachers as well. Innovative history teachers, for instance, might use virtual reality goggles to help students gain an appreciation for what ancient Rome was like, and cutting-edge biology and chemistry teachers could employ virtual reality models to explain how atoms of carbon and oxygen form to create carbon dioxide and how this, in turn, leads to global climate change.
Why there is even an avatar called “Virtual Eve” which is providing personalized instruction to some students. To appreciate how sophisticated it is, Eve can even sense when students are bored, frustrated or confused.
The field of education is ripe with opportunity and technology offers the educational community an exciting opportunity to do its job better and more effectively. But first teachers, administrators—and, yes, even students—must understand that a great many tools are already available to assist them in their most important of missions.
Interested in other education-related posts by Jack? Check out these past writings:
The Future of Education: Is it About to Be Rekindled?
The Future of College
What Language Will the Future Speak?
Do the Impossible: A Case Study
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
The Power of Zenzizenzizenzic
Carl Sagan once advised the public to “never underestimate the power of exponential.” It was sound advice. Unfortunately, as with so much other wise counsel, it is easy to dismiss.
You shouldn’t.
Consider just a few recent examples of exponential growth. In 1998, a small Silicon Valley start-up was conducting 25 million web-based searches a day. The company had developed an impressive technology but it hardly seemed transformative in nature. Ten years of exponential growth later, however, and Google has changed everything from how people get their news and entertainment to how politics and health care are practiced.
Wikipedia offers yet another example of exponential growth. Who amongst us could have imagined in 2001 when the first 100 Wikipedia entries were placed on the Internet that within six years the site--which relies on free labor no less--would become the most widely used informational source in the world?
It would be easy to believe that Google and Wikipedia are unique and, as such, represent one-time anomalies. They are not.
Ironically, if you type the word “exponential” into Google, the first search item that comes up is an entry from Wikipedia. If one then clicks on the list of “exponential topics” at the bottom of the definition there is an odd looking word: zenzizenzizenzic.
The term is defined as a number to its eighth power. Thus, the zenzizenzizenzic of 2 is 2(8)--or 256.
Now zenzizenzizenzic might seem like a rather innocent concept, but recall that Google and Wikipedia both experienced zenzizenzizenzic-like growth and, in the process, transformed a number of industries; and, in the coming decade, so too will a number of other emerging technologies.
Consider, for example, that earlier this month Intel Corporation announced it had successfully doubled--to 2 billion--the number of transistors it has crammed onto its next-generation computer chip.
The real world manifestation of Intel’s zenzizenzizenzic is that we can now purchase a computer over 200 times more powerful than the one we bought a 1997--at one-third the cost.
Moreover, because the semiconductor industry will likely continue its little trick of effectively doubling the number of transistors it can place on a computer chip every 18 months this implies that by 2020 the zenzizenzizenzic of today’s 2 billion transistor could morph into a 500 billion transistor computer chip. Try wrapping your mind around what such super-powerful computers might enable us to do and achieve.
Exponential growth, though, is not simply limited to the computer and Internet industries. Data storage, bandwidth, gene sequencing and even the growth of synthetic diamonds are all expected to undergo zenzizenzizenzic progression in the coming decade.
In fact these fields are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. According to Gartner Research, the field rapid prototype manufacturing (i.e. machines which can physically print objects) will grow more than 100-fold. And in the past few months, researchers in Finland have replaced a patient’s lower jaw with synthetic material growth from stem cells; researchers at the University of Minnesota have successfully demonstrated that they could grow a beating rat heart from living cells; and self-driven robotic cars have successfully navigated through an urban environment. Progress in these fields will not stop.
It has been said that the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed. This is true and if one studies the amazing technological progress occurring in information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, neurotechnology and robotics and then applies the power of zenzizenzizenzic to these advances, it is easy to understand how it would behoove us all to reconsider Carl Sagan’s sage advice.
Interested in reading some exponentially-related posts? Check these past musings by Jack Uldrich:
57 Years is Now Just 41 Days
The Accelerating Pace of Disruption
Don’t Incrementalize Yourself Into the Future
Dangerous Curves Ahead
Exponential Evolution
Pong and the Future of the President’s Brain
Do You Believe in the Tooth Fairy?
Einstein, Intel and All the Rice in China
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Follow the Ants … or Not
In my new book, Jump the Curve, I dedicate an entire chapter to the idea that business executives can learn a great deal from the biological world around us. One of the more interesting creatures I highlight is the humble ant.
According to this fascinating article from the London Telegraph, we can now add one more thing that the ant can teach us: It doesn’t alway pay to follow the person—or ant—in front of you!
According to the study, people have a frightening tendency to follow what the previous person did—regardless of whether their action is the best, most efficient or wisest course of action. One real world consequence of this behavior is that in the event of a fire people can mindlessly follow the crowd to their own demise.
One way to prevent being lead astray by the crowd is to borrow another trick from the ant’s bag of tricks. In many ant colonies there are a handful of “wild ants” or “pioneer ants” that purposely stray from the crowd. Often, it is these rogue ants that blaze new trails and, more importantly, find new sources of food.
In this same way, it is important for businesses to hire the equivalent of “wild ants”—free spirits if you will—who don’t conform to the crowd.
These people are not always easy to get along with (because they don’t conform), but they could very well be the key to your business’ future survival because they are the ones who are most likely to spot the new trends and blaze the new trails.
If you doubt me and are looking for a second opinion on this idea, I’d encourage you to consult the Good Book. Proverbs 6:6 reads: ”Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.” Be wise, indeed.
Looking for more bits of inspiration from the animal kingdom? Check out these past posts:
To Survive ... Change Diets
Swarm Intelligence Gets Even Smarter
Biomimickry at its Best
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Unlearning the Tipping Point
In this month’s Fast Company there is an excellent article entitled ”Is the Tipping Point Toast?” by Clive Thompson. I’d strongly recommend that marketing executives and anyone else interested in the idea of unlearning read it.
What I like about the article is that it challenges conventional wisdom and provides further evidence that common sense can often be misleading. In short the article, which is based on the research of Duncan Watts, challenges Malcolm Gladwell’s tantalyzing idea that “mavens” and “influentials” are often the key to getting ideas or products to reach the “tipping point.”
Alas, marketing is not that simple and unless a great many marketing professionals “unlearn” their over-reliance on trying to “influence the influencers” they could end up wasting a great deal of time and money.
Interested in other posts on the topic of unlearning? Check out these articles:
Learn to Ask New Questions
Does the Pharmaceutical Industry Need to Unlearn?
Is the Health Care Industry prepared to Unlearn?
Learning to Unlearn: Case Study #1
Examples of Unexponential Thinking
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Learn to Ask New Questions
We have all been there at some time—standing in line at the airport waiting to board a plane and thinking to ourselves that “there has to be a better way.” Well, apparently, there is now. According to this informative article a researcher at Fermilab has figured out the optimal way to board an airplane.
His findings are counter-intuitive to say the least. Contrary to what one might expect, boarding from the back of the plane first isn’t the optimal method. Rather, the optimal method is to board passangers 10 at a time in every other row. Apparently this allows passangers to store their baggage overhead at a faster rate.
As I say in my new book, Jump the Curve, accerlating advances in computer processing power and algorithms will often result in findings that challenge conventional wisdom. The big question now is whether executives in the airline industry will have the courage to listen to an outsider (the researcher, Jason Steffen is a physicist) and whether the industry itself can “unlearn” its current behavior of loading passengers from the the back of the plane.
Interested in other posts on the topic of unlearning? Check out these articles:
Does the Pharmaceutical INdustry Need to Unlearn?
Is the Health Care Industry prepared to Unlearn?
Learning to Unlearn: Case Study #1
Examples of Unexponential Thinking
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
The Week in Review
On a weekly basis I write a regular article for The Motley Fool -- an online investment newsletter—discussing how scientific and technological breakthroughs from just the past week might impact a variety of different industries and companies. Although it is written primarily with the individual investor in mind, the column is also a useful read for executives and managers who are interested in jumping the curve. This week’s article reviews how progress in the fields of nanotechnology and carbon capture technology could transform the textile, automobile and energy industries.
Related Posts
Dangerous Curves Ahead
The Week in Innovation (December 12)The Week in Innovation (December 2)
The Week in Innovation (November 26)
The Week in Innovation (November 19)
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
A Cloned Booger? Believe It!
Yesterday, I addressed a large meeting of professional managers at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. And whenever I speak about the future and future technologies to such groups and organizations, I tell them that they need to keep a very open mind regarding the future.
To this end, if I would have told you only five years ago that someone would be willing to pay $150,000 to have a dead pitbull (named Booger no less) cloned, would you have believed it?
Well, this strange vision of the future has now come true according to this article.
My point is that unless you follow the exponential advances in information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and the cognitives sciences, a great many things which sound either impossible or far-fetched today could very well come to fruition much sooner than you expect. It’s all the more reason that you learn to jump the curve.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
1 Gram = 2,000 Square Meters
Last month I told you how advances in future technology are compressing 57 years into 41 days and today I’d like to show you how one gram of material can be stretched into 2000 square meters.
The advance is enabled by nanotechnology and it possible because new nanomaterials are extremely porous. This trait allows copious amount of a liquid or gas—such as carbon dioxide—to come in contact with the material and either be captured or catalyzed. Technology Review was a good article on this topic, but I’d like to remind my readers that it isn’t necessary to have an advanced degree in nanotechnology to understand how such advances might impact your business within the next few years.
All you need to know is that these advances are coming. I have explained before how radical advances in computer modeling are accelerating the creation of new materials, and I have demonstrated how companies such as General Motors are already using new “smart materials” to gain a competitive advantage. If you want to “jump the curve” and stay ahead of your peers, however, you need to begin boning up on your material sciences now.
A case in point is this new nanomaterial which can pack 2000 square meters of surface area into one gram of material . It could, quite possibly, revolutionize the electrical utility industry by making coal-produced electricity both cleaner and less expensive to produce. This is because the new material could store up to 80 times its volume in carbon dioxide yet cost only a fraction of existing CO2-capture techniques. Better yet—the advance is only two to three years away from commercialization.
Interested in another look at how nanotechnology will impact the electrical utility industry? Check out this article:
Nanotechnology and the Changing Face of the Electric Utility Industry.
And if you want to know how new and future technologies might help reverse global warming, read this post:
Goodbye Global Warming
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Georgia Tech Jumps the Curve
If you want to see where the future is headed one of the best things you can do is keep a close eye on what is going on at some of the leading universities around the world. In this regard, a great deal of attention is usually focused on MIT, Harvard and Cal-Berkeley, but there are a few other universities worth watching. One of my personal favorites is Georgia Tech.
Earlier this week, researchers there announced progress in developing a technology to capture, store and eventually eventually recycle carbon from automobiles. I have written about this idea before but if Georgia Tech can successfully create a more sustainable carbon-based economy it would have huge ramifications for not only the automobile and energy industries but the world economy.
And in another stunning development announced just yesterday, Georgia Tech scientists are now making great strides in producing a new nano-fiber that could some day allowing your clothing to power everything from electronics to tiny biosensors inside your body. This is the type of research that executives in the biomedical, energy and fashion industries need to be paying close attention to now—especially if they hope to jump the curve to tomorrow’s exponential economy.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Jump the Curve With Lickable Ads
As both a speaker and a consultant, I am often called into organizations to jump start their creativity and innovative thinking. The advantage I have—whether I am speaking to a hospital association, an educational organization, an energy company or a non-profit organization—is that I am not a part of their immediate culture. I am what some people would call a ”zero-gravity” consultant. That is I am free to float outside of their existing environment because I’m not constrained by the same rules.
The value I bring is that I do specialize in focusing on how emerging and future technologies will impact their business. As just one small sample of this skill, I will use the new lickable ads that the advertising industry is now salivating over.
The Wall Street Journal has done a good job explaining how these ads will be used in magazine inserts, but is that the only thing the technology will provide for?
Hardly.
Innovative grocery stores and retail shops should consider using the technology to entice people to “taste” new foods or beverages. Other companies could market them as a way to help parents to get kids to try a new food or the U.S. Post Office could market new blueberry or strawberry tasting stamps.
The technology shouldn’t stop there. If just the right molecules can be used to create a tasty, lickable ad; it stands to reason that it could also be used to deliver drugs in innovative ways. Perhaps your child hates taking a certain cough medicine. If, however, the medicine could be placed on a “Dora the Explorer” sticker it might be easier to get them to take their medicine.
The bottom-line is that if you want to “jump the curve,” it helps to think different.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Believe in Fairy Tales
In my new book, Jump the Curve, one of the key strategies I employ to help people envision the future is to encourage them to keep an open mind. To do this, I ask that they learn again how to think like a child.
The reason I do this is because exponential advances in technology will create some amazing things in the future. But sometimes people can only be open to these wonderful opportunities if they engage in child-like thinking. (To get a general idea of this theme, I encourage you to read this old post entitled ”Do You Believe in the Tooth Fairy.")
Well, there is a great article in today’s paper entitled ”The Science of Fairy Tales” which discusses whether some fairy tale myths can actually come true. The results—which are all grounded in sound science—might surprise you. It’s just another reason why all need to keep a very open mind with regard to the future.
If you don’t believe me, just ask a young child.
Related Posts
Set Discontinuous Goals
Don’t Incrementalize Yourself Into the Future
Dangerous Curves Ahead
Exponential Evolution
A Useful Analogy for Thinking About the Future
Think 10X, Not 10%
Einstein, Intel and All the Rice in China
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Watch What You Eat—Literally
Last week, I was widely quoted in this article about the future of the cellphone. Somewhat surprisingly, the reporter didn’t spend much time discussing my thoughts about the cellphone becoming a health care diagnostic tool. (Interested readers are encouraged to read this post for a more detailed discussion of this idea.)
This is unfortunate because I believe that this will be a real future trend. Earlier today I discussed how the rapidly dropping price of gene sequencing technology would revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry, but I also think it will change how food retailers market their products and how consumers use their cellphones.
Why is this? Because technology always changes people’s behavior. One of the consequences of more genetic information becoming more widely available is that companies will look for innovative methods to exploit that information and, of course, consumers will want to make use of this information.
Therefore, it won’t be enough in the future for a person to know he or she has a certain gene which is, say, an indicator of prostate cancer or some other disease—they will want to do something about this issue. Food marketers will soon understand this and will begin telling you, for example, that if you have gene X than product Y is great for you. But because such information can’t easily be slapped on a label (because the gene may be fairly unique to you), these marketers will look to exploit advances in RFID technology to communicate this information to you.
And this is where your cellphone will come in handy because, in the near future, you might be able to program it such that it identifies all of those food products which represent a good fit for your genetic profile.
Related Posts
The Future of the Grocery Store
Retailers are Beginning to Jump the Curve
Pump It Up: Retailers Use Google to Bolster Customer Loyalty
Time is Money ... So Walk the Escalator
Stronger Than a Speeding Bullet
RFID Gets Untracked
Embracing Change
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
A Thousand Reasons for the Pharmaceutical Industry to Rethink Its Business
In my job as a corporate futurist and change management consultant, I spent a good deal of time reading about emerging and future technology trends. Some days it is obvious that certain trends are absolutely undeniable. Yesterday was one of those days.
I began my day by reading an article noting that genetic researchers had identified more than 10 new genetic links to prostate cancer. More significantly, two of these markers can now be included in a new diagostic test.
I have written before about the promise and perils of genetic testing but, at the time, I noted that the cost of individualized was currently $350,000 - a price tag that greatly limits their wide-spread effectiveness.
It would be foolish, however, for professionals in either the health care or life sciences industry to think that this price tag will stay constant. In fact, yesterday it was reported that Illinuma may have sequenced the genome of an individual for $100,000. And a second article claimed that Pacific Biosciences hopes to sequence an individual’s entire genome in a matter of minutes for less than $1,000 within the next few years.
This is amazing because just a few years ago, it cost Craig Venter $70 million to sequence his entire genome. This lower price point should give the health care and pharmaceutical industries a 1000 reasons to begin rethinking their businesses—now.
For starters, I know that companies such as Roche have moved aggressively into this field by purchasing companies like 454 Life Sciences. What this suggests is that as genetic sequencing equipment continues to drop in price and ever more people begin gathering genetic information, these people will require a great deal of assistance in understanding and managing these results.
The flood of genetic information will also place an ever greater shift on preventative care. In turn, customers won’t just demand help in dealing with existing conditions they will want assistance in preventing disease from occurring in the first place. The pharmaceutical industry will need to adjust accordingly.
The industry will also need to ”unlearn” its reliance on big blockbuster drugs. It will still be some time before the “era of personalized medicine” arrives, but patients will be getting increasingly sophisticated at understanding how they will react to certain drugs. The one-size-fits-all era in the pharmaceutical will quickly go the way of the one-color (black) Model T Ford went in the automobile industry.
And as patients become more sophisticated, you can bet that lawyers and regulators will also become more sophisticated in managing, exploiting and governing how all of this genetic information can be handled.
Related Posts
The Future is about to Get Personal
Does the Pharmaceutical Industry Also Need to Unlearn
The Coming Health Care Revolution
Why the Health Care Sector Should Give a Rat’s Ass
Reality Stems Stem Cell Breakthrough
The Future of Organ Sales
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
The Future of Kid’s Health?
Last year, I wrote an article for the Motley Fool entitled “
Prepare for the Virtualetes.” At the time, it was my contention that more and more young people would begin seeking to demonstrate their real athletic prowess via video games. I further argued that since these new games would require them to do more than just sit on a couch and twittle their thumbs at a blistering pace that this prowess would, in fact, be recognized as a legitimate form of athletics in the not-so-distant future.
Well, it now appears that the first “work-out” facility for these virtualetes is up and operational. According to this article, a high-tech sweat shop has been established in St. Paul, Minnesota. And while its real goal is to combat America’s growing obestity problem by getting kids to engage in athletic activity via video games, I’d argue that it takes us one step closer to the era of virtualetes. Perhaps, the first official Virtualetes games can be held in Athens in 2012.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
The Future of Advertising: Esther Dyson’s View
Often when people think about the future of advertising they envision a scenario similar to the one in the 2002 movie, Minority Report, where Tom Cruise’s character is bombarded with personalized ads as he walks through a public space. The technology will soon exist to make this vision a reality, yet as Esther Dyson argues in his wonderfully reasoned opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled ”The Coming Ad Revolution” people will “pay less and less attention” to these personalized ads. This is because users will assume greater control over their own online data and, in a way that allows them to control their privacy, they will begin using friends and other trusted sources (including vendors) to collect, gather and receive information that is pertinent and valuable to them.
Related Posts
The Future of Advertising & Media Lays in Convergence
The Future of Advertising & Gaming: E-Ink + Media Wall + Reactrix
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
The Future of College
In my hometown newspaper, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, the headline story in today’s paper highlights that tution at the University of Minnesota—a public institution—is expected to increase to over $10,000 next year. Undoubtedly, this will set off a great bout of handwringing by the elite twittering classes that education is falling out of the reach of middle-class and even upper middle-class families. Their future prognastications will grow even more dire as these pundits extrapolate out ten years (which is when my own kids will be attending college) using an ever escalating cost of tution.
Will things really that bad?
I don’t believe so because many people are failing to “jump the curve.” In the future, I not only believe college education will be lower—it might be dramatcially lower.
Impossible you say? MIT’s innovative open course ware program -- which allows anyone to access MIT’s college courses—is now available free on-line. Other schools such as the University of California at Berkeley are also joining the movement. And there is every reason to believe that more and more schools—especially those with huge endowments—will join.
If this happens, the number and quality of free college-level courses will soar. As it does, the economics underlying today’s existing colleges and universities could come crashing down.
In the future, I’m convinced that it will matter less where you received your college degree and, instead, more emphasis will be placed on the knowledge a person can demonstrate. (It will also be critical that they demonstrate an ability and willingness to engage in life-long learning). And the reality is that much of this knowledge can now be obtained free, on-line.
The question existing colleges and universities—as well as the politicians—who will all be clamouring for more money (to control rising costs) need to ask themselves is: Are they prepared to “unlearn” their reliance on money and “relearn” a new way of doing business?
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Craig Venter: Exponential Executive
Describing what an “exponential executive” is exactly is difficult. In fact, it is kind of like that old saw which has been attributed to Louis Brandeis, who when he was asked to define pornography, responded by saying “I’ll know it when I see it.”
I have identified a few “exponential executives” in the past such as George C. Marshall, but I’d now like to introduce you to another: Craig Venter, the man largely responsible for first sequencing the human genome back in 2001 and the founder of the Institute of Genomic Research.
Venter is now the leading pioneer in the promising field of synthetic biology , which as I have explained before, has the ability to bring about paradigm-shifting changes in the fields of agriculture, energy and pharmaceuticals.
The other day, however, the New York Times ran a fascinating article entitled ”Pursuing Synthetic Life, Dazzled by Reality.” In the article there is this wonderful quote from Venter: ”My view is that we know less than 1 percent of what’s out there in the biological universe.”
It is a great quote and it is why I believe Venter is an exponential executive. The wise person knows what he doesn’t know and, in this case, Venter has realized that society has only begun to tap the surface of Mother Nature’s biological secrets. This attitude is likely to take him very far indeed. In fact, it is likely that the field of synthetic biology will experience exponential growth because of this humble attitude.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Do the Impossible: Operate on Yourself
In my new book, Jump the Curve, the final chapter is called “Do the Impossible.” The general idea behind the chapter is that due to the exponential advance in a number of future technologies what seems “impossible” today might, in fact, become commonplace tomorrow.
For example, today, the idea of performing surgery on yourself sounds ludricious. In the future, however, it might not. Consider this article showing that researchers at the University of Nebraska have constructed the necessary robotic tools to allow NASA astronauts--with no medical training--to successfully perform an appendectomy on themselves.
Now, I don’t imagine that you and I will be performing such a procedure on ourselves anytime soon, but it does open up interesting possibilities for telesurgery and allowing, say, doctors in a big city to perform a long-distance telesurgery on a patient in a rural setting.
Related Posts
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Jump the Curve to Antarctica
When thinking about the future it is not enough to extrapolate how one technology might transform your business. More often than not, it is necessary to consider how a variety of technologies might converge to transform your business. Consider this article which explains how scientists have innovatively employed existing advances in robotics, solar panels and satellite technology to construct the world’s most advanced observatory—without needing to station any humans in the remote and forbidding land of Antarctica.
It is a wonder example of, what I call in my new book, “walking the escalator.” The question you need to ask yourself is this: Are there existing technologies which I can be combining in my business in order to do things differently or more efficiently? My guess is that the answer is yes.
Related Posts
Walk the Escalator with Text Analytics
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
The Future of Toys is Our Future
It is often said that children are our future. As the father of an 8 year-old daughter and a six year-old son, I couldn’t agree more. Yesterday, however, I came across two interesting news items that put a slightly different spin on this notion of children being our future.
The first item was sent to me as a news release touting that Corgi International, one of the world’s leading toy-makers, had launched the H2GO—a wickedly cool fuel-cell powered toy car. (The picture is on the top right.)
Now, I understand that fuel cell technology has been over-hyped since about the year 2000, but the creation of this toy is great news for the long beleagued hydrogen industry. If Corgi can successfully get the H2GO into the hands of millions of kids (and I hope to start with my own), I think it is entirely plausible that by the time those kids begin getting their drivers license many of them will want to be cruising around in real fuel-cell powered automobiles which emit no carbon dioxide.
The second item I came across was this article in the Wall Street Journal touting Ugobe’s new realistic robotic dinosaur, Pleo. Unlike so other other past robots, Pleo is very life-like. And just as H2GO offers a glimpse into the future of hydrogen fuel cells, I believe Pleo offers us a glimpse into the future of robotics. As kids grow up playing—and getting comfortable with—robots, there is every reason to think they will want to continue this habit later in life—especially if those robots can also clean their dishes and take care of their ailing parents.
Interestingly, the review of Pleo was quite positive except for compliants about the length of its battery. (It only lasts an hour.) In the future, however, my guess is that this problem will be easily overcome as a result of continued advances in fuel-cell technology. Just imagine if Pleo could keep itself juiced just by fetching itself a drink of water whenever it felt its energy level dropping! Now, you might still need to worry about Pleo relieving itself on your carpet, but you could at least take comfort in knowing that its pee would only be pure water. (Alternatively, I guess, you could also tranform Pleo it into a dragon-like creature and have it blow out its waste product in the form of steam.)
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
The Future is about to Get Personal
Seven years ago this month, scientists revealed the map of the entire human genome—the genetic material contained in human cells which provide the “instructions” for creating a human being. Since then the promise of genomics has outpaced what its practitioners could realistically deliver.
In 2007, however, the field witnessed a number of notable developments. In February, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved MammaPrint—a test manufactured by Agendia which surveys 70 genes in the tumor cells of breast cancer patients and determines if those genes are turned on or off. Doctors then use this information to determine if the cancer is likely to spread and decide whether the patient needs to undergo more chemotherapy or surgery. (If universally applied, Agendia claims 60,000 women would avoid unnecessary chemotherapy every year.)
In September, the FDA allowed genetic testing to help patients gauge the best dosage for warfarin (Coumadin) based on the presence of two individual genes. The result is that patients will be able to use the drug more effectively by minimizing the risk that the drug—which is used to prevent clotting—could cause their blood to get too thin and result in bleeding problems.
Progress in the field was not merely limited to the identification of individual genes related to certain diseases or risk factors. In July, 454 LifeScience sequenced James Watson’s (one of the scientists who worked out the structure of DNA molecules) entire genome, and in September, Craig Venter, the founder of Celera, published his entire individual genetic sequence and invited the world to look at it over the Internet.
Later still, a new start-up, Knome, announced it would begin offering to sequence a person’s genome and have a group of specialists analyze the results (for a mere $350,000). And in December, Nanosphere went public and saw an initial spike to its stock price based in large part on news that the company’s new molecular diagnostic testing technology could rapidly and inexpensively test for certain genetic markers.
In spite of these advances and other breakthroughs—genetic testing, for instance, is very effective at identifying cystic fibrosis—the field is still in its infancy.
The problem with most genetic information is that its predictive value is relatively weak at this time. Only rarely do single genes cause certain diseases. More often, multiple genes—if not hundreds and possibly even thousands—are working together in yet unknown ways to influence a person’s health. To add to this confusion, environmental factors and personal lifestyle choices also play a strong role in many diseases. Even armed with new information—such as the role single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) play in individual disease—and lower cost, faster and more effective diagnostic testing technology, sorting out all this new genetic information will be a laborious process.
The problem can be illuminated with a simple example. Some companies now claim that possessing the gene, TCF7L2, doubles a person’s risk of contracting Type 2 diabetes (from 7% to 14%). This is good information to know, especially if you lead a lifestyle that favors the onset of Type 2 diabetes. However, a comprehensive study of over 1000 people with the gene found that 80% of the people with the gene didn’t get Type 2 diabetes. To further muddy the waters, 40% of people who develop Type 2 diabetes don’t possess the gene.
And therein lays both genomics promise and its peril. In certain situations, genetic information can lead people to take preemptive action. In other situations, though, it is not clear what action—if any—a person should take based on the information. The trick is in determining when action should be taken. And unless people have a good understanding of statistics, probability and risk analysis; the findings can be exploited in ways that generate a great deal of confusion as well as cause unnecessary concern.
The situation is likely to get much worse before it gets better. In 2007, a handful of companies including decode Genomic, 23andMe and Navigenic, all began providing genome-wide DNA analysis to the general public.
This coming flood of genetic information is one reason why the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) felt compelled to issue a study last fall warning Congress and the American public about how consumers were being misled into believing that they were at greater risk of suffering from a variety diseases based on genetic information. In one case, the GAO audit found customers being sold “nutrigenomic” supplements for $1200 (to counteract diseases for which they were already at low risk) which they could have purchased off-the-shelf for $35.
The bottom-line is that genetic information is getting better and the field is rapidly maturing, but the widespread commercialization of truly effective genetic testing is premature at this time. Health care professionals can expect to continue to hear a good deal more about genomic tests and their immense potential in the year ahead, but I’d caution readers to take most of the information with a healthy dose of salt.
The learning curve before both genomic companies and consumers is vast and it is likely that the federal government will get more involved in the coming years in a regulatory role in an effort to keep companies from over promising results and to keep consumers from taking costly actions which may lead to only negligible improvements in health.
In this way the situation is not unlike the Wild West of the mid-19th century. There are legitimate pioneers seeking to settle the land—and they will in time. But in the rush to settle this fertile territory it will be difficult to keep people from rushing willy-nilly into the area in hopes of discovering better health as well as to keep out snake-oil salesmen from pitching their products to those same people. The government will provide some minimal protection but, for the time being, individuals are really on their own and need to exercise extreme caution before wading too deep into the field.
Related Posts
The Coming Health Care Revolution
Visualize the Future of Health Care
Be Still My Virtual Heart
The Future of Health Care: Part 2
The Future of Health Care
Why the Health Care Sector Should Give a Rat’s Ass
Mayo Clinic Has Got Some Game
Hospitals Need to Get Plastered
Reality Stems Stem Cell Breakthrough
The Future of Organ Sales
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Does the Pharmaceutical Industry Also Need to Unlearn?
Last month, I had a post discussing the health care industry’s need to “unlearn.” They are not, however, the only industry which might benefit from unlearning. I recently came across this article discussing how targeting “gut bugs” could revolutionize the development of future drugs.
I am not enough of an expert in the field to know for certain if the strategy will work, but I do know that innovative new strategies often come out of “left field’ and tend to be dismissed by more “established” experts in the early stages of their development.
At a minimum, if you are in the pharmaceutical industry, the idea deserves serious consideration. Who knows it might even help you “jump the curve.”
Interested in other posts on the topic of unlearning? Check out these articles:
Is the Health Care Industry prepared to Unlearn?
Learning to Unlearn: Case Study #1
Examples of Unexponential Thinking
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
2 Billion Reasons to Focus on the Future
Earlier today I received an email from a friend with this quote from George Scalise, the president of the Semiconductor Industry Association: ”The typical desktop system of 2007 was at least 100 times more powerful than the typical system of 1997 but cost only about one-third as much—$630 in 2007 compared to $1,833 in 1997.”
It is an excellent example of the power of exponential growth and it offers yet another reason for executives to learn how to “jump the curve.” This is because this trend isn’t going to stop any time soon and as computers continue to grow more powerful and less expensive they will continue to transform a variety of industries.
In fact, Intel announced earlier today that it is introducing a new chip, dubbed Tukwila, which contains more than 2 billion transistors. This is double the 1 billion transistors it squeezed onto a chip just two years ago.
Of course, an even better way to think of this advance is this: By doubling the number of transistors in just two years Intel has effectively doubled the entire amount of progress the company has made since 1971! This is because each subsequent advance of any exponential is equal to all the previous doublings—combined!
More interesting still is the fact that Intel intends to release a 4-billion transistor chip in 2010. If the company continues this progress through 2018 that mean we will have computers another 100 times more powerful than we have today at a cost of about $200. Now, “jump the curve” and try to imagine what will be possible with computers that powerful and that inexpensive.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Bill Belichik: Goat or Exponential Executive?
Everyone loves to be a Monday Morning Quarterback—especially after a closely fought Super Bowl—and I’m no exception. My point is this post, however, is not to criticize New England Patriot coach, Bill Belichik; rather, it is to congratulate him.
Now widely overlooked in his team’s stunning loss to the New York Giants was his decision in the third quarter to go for it on 4th & 13 from his team’s 30-yardline instead of kicking a field goal. In retrospect, had he kicked the field goal (which was at the outer range of his kicker’s range), the game might have gone into overtime.
I applaud Belichik’s decision to go for it because I know it wasn’t based on some seat-of-the-pants “gut-feeling.” Instead, it was the result of his reliance on analytics. (For a more thorough discussion of this technology, I’d encourage you to read this article.) And although the “numbers” didn’t work out in this case, one reason his team was undefeated up to that point and in the Super Bowl was because Belichik had consistently relied on analytics throughout the season to make the smartest decision.
Unfortunately for Belichik and the Patriots the numbers don’t always turn out. Still this is no reason not to continue to rely on analytics. Conventional wisdom should be damned and, over time, the law of averages will continue to work in the Patriot’s favor and that’s why I’d expect to see the Patriots back in the Super Bowl next year.
As I say in my book, Jump the Curve, the true Exponential Executive must be willing to “dare to succeed unconventionally.” Belichik has proven that he is willing to do this and, in spite of last night’s outcome, he should be congratulated for sticking to the numbers.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including the forthcoming Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business, and speaks frequently on future trends, innovation, change management, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID technology and executive leadership to the manufacturing and industrial equipment industries.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
The Future of 3-D Printing is Exponential
Late last year, I wrote an article entitled ”3-D Prinitng: The Shape of Things to Come.” As a futurist, I still feel quite strongly about the technology and its potential ramifications for the future of manufacturing.
It was with some interest then that I read this article. Here’s the operative passage: ”By 2011, Gartner expects the number of 3-D printer to increase 100-fold from their 2006 levels.” A 100-fold improvement in a five period year represents an extraordinary amount of change in a short period of time, and, if nothing else, it should provide executives in the manufacturing world yet another reason to learn how to jump the curve!
Related Posts
Top TenTech Trends
3-D Printing: The Shape of Things to Come
Jack Uldrich is a writer, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including the forthcoming Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business, and speaks frequently on future trends, innovation, change management, nanotechnology, robotics, RFID technology and executive leadership to the manufacturing and industrial equipment industries.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Ship Bits, Not Carbon
It has been widely reported that the Internet can reduce greenhouse emissions by 1 billion tons over the next decade as result of companies such as EnerNoc and Verdiem developing better methods to monitor and control residential and business energy usage. This is undoubtedly true, but people to begin thinking even more broadly about the Internet’s ability to protect the environment.
Act Local
It’s a cliche to be sure, yet the old mantra about thinking globally and acting local still rings true and the growing power of social networks can greatly amplify this tendency.
For instance, as the father of two grade-schoolers, my wife and I regularly cart our kids to their myriad of extra-curricular activities. Not surprisingly, at every practice, an army of SUV’s and minivans fill the parking lot. Most vehicles chauffeured only one child and, more often than not, many of these children either live in the same neighborhood or attend the same school. Now, as much as I love my children and would love to believe they are imbued with extraordinary talents, it is not imperative that I-- or any other parent—be attendance at every practice.
My point is that there is no reason why my fellow parents and I can’t better coordinate our activities and car-pool in the same way that today’s free-wheeling, net-savvy teens use social networking tools to plan their activities and share the burdens of daily life. (Alternatively, if a parent feels that he or she just can’t bear to miss a single karate chop, piano recital or soccer kick, perhaps they could convince the sponsoring organization to stream the event onto the web.)
Act Global
Often lost in the discussion about the Internet’s ability to protect the environment is a discussion about the power of the open-source movement. A few weeks back, I read about an innovative technology that might actually take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. (Yes, I know that trees also already do this but this technology might potentially to do it on a larger and quicker timescale).
The technology is still in an early stage of development, but this is where the Internet could help it along. There is a universe of bright, intelligent people who are accessible via the Internet and if given access to the right information might be able to build upon it and facilitate the technology’s entry into the commercial marketplace.
To opponents who question why anyone with such a potentially valuable technology would share it, I would answer that the Internet is already being successfully exploited by innovative companies to do everything from search for new gold deposits to develop new blockbuster drugs. There is no reason why this technology or other new clean technologies can’t be developed in a similar fashion.
Think Different
John Maynard Keynes once said that it is more efficient to “ship recipes than biscuits.” His point was that shipping information and knowledge—and not physical products—is the key to an efficient economic system.
The farsighted economist was absolutely right and the Internet provides society a grand opportunity to rethink this maxim anew—and in an environmental context. Consider the case of Amazon’s new electronic book-reader, Kindle. If we truly want to protect the environment and reduce our impact on the environment, does it really make sense to cut down trees to produce the paper for books; use tons of coal-power electricity to manufacture the books; and then transport those books across the country with gas-guzzling, fossil fuel-powered trucks—all for the privilege of then storing the books in rooms and libraries which must be heated?
How much better would it be to digitally transmit books to electronic devices in a way that leaves only a fraction of the book publishing industry’s carbon footprint?
This, however, is just the beginning. As advances in digital, computer-aided-design are coupled with advances in rapid prototype manufacturing (i.e. printing physical objects) and nanotechnology, the list of future products which might also be shipped in the form of information could grow exponentially.
What’s Really Need: A Change in a Behavior
These modest proposals only hint at the Internet’s potential to enhance the environment. The one common element is that they all also require a change in human behavior. And that, perhaps, is where those of us interested in protecting the environment might want to continue to leverage the Internet—to educate people on how their current behaviors are adversely impacting the environment and then convince them to act out their lives in new, different and more sustainable ways.
Related Posts
Goodbye Global Warming?
Oil Industry Jumps the Curve with Nanotechnology
Grand Plan for Solar Energy is More Than a Reasonable Idea
Pennies From Heaven?
Synthetic Biology: Creating a New Form of Life
The Future of Bioenergy
How Nanotechnology Will Change the Face of the Electric Utility Industry
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
Feel the Future
Haptic technology refers to technology which interfaces the user via the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations and/or motions to the user. Perhaps the easiest way to think of the technology is to envision the 2002 movie, The Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise’s character is able to move around and feel virtual objects using only a special glove.
Haptic technology, however, is no longer science fiction. According to this article, researchers in Europe have created a pre-commercialization prototype of a device that allows people to “feel” different textiles. The technology is in a very early stage of development so I don’t want to imply it will be revolutioning any industry just yet, but if one considers the advances in virtual reality technology and broadband capability, it is not difficult to imagine how in the not-too-distant future retailers might utilize the technology in virtual reality settings to allow consumers to “feel” the fabric on a new couch or a new suit jacket. (It also has obvious applications in the video gaming industry). Another possible application include using the technology to train future surgeons.
When one further considers the advances in 3-D virtual modeling, it even becomes plausible to consider how educators might employ the technology to more effectively teach subjects such as chemistry, physics and biology by helping students physically “feel” a molecule—and thus better understand its physical properties.
In short, haptic technology is yet another technology that is likely to grow expoentially in the years ahead, and if one hopes to become an “Exponential Executive” it would behoove you to put the technology on your radar screen now.
Jack Uldrich is a writer, futurist, public speaker and host of jumpthecurve.net. He is the author of seven books, including Jump the Curve and The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business. He is also a frequent speaker on future technology and future trends, nanotechnology, innovation, change management and executive leadership to a variety of businesses, industries and non-profit organizations and trade associations.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.
A Better Look at the Future
The other day I pointed out many of the glaring problems with the Wall Street Journal’s crappy article about the future. Well, there is now a new article about the future available compliments of PCWorld and, of the two, the latter does a much better job in my opinion of prognasticating about what tomorrow might look like.
As I said in my earlier critique of the WSJ’s predictions, I thought its writers were too timid in their projections. The PCWorld article has some of that, but at least its editors were willing to throw out some far reaching and bold ideas. To this end, I particularly liked this quote: ”There’s a very short leap between implanting a cochlear device and one that lets you receive information directly from the Internet.”
To many people, the idea of directly downloading information from the Internet might sound implausible, but if one “jumps the curve” from today’s progress in the field (a professor in England and his wife are already conducting a crude form of “thought” communication) and then extrapolate this progress out into the future, one can envision how such a technology might take-off.
For people serious about thinking about the future, I highly recommend the article.
Enjoy this post? Bookmark at the following sites.